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Motions at the Lambeth Conference that speak of the “mind of the Communion” only reinforce the deeply un-Anglican but increasingly common idea that the Church is some top-down structure where people are told what to believe by a gathering of (mostly) men in pointy hats. And the inclusion of worldwide representation for choosing the next Archbishop, while ushered in under the banner of greater inclusion, is actually a way of making the Archbishop into a kind of Anglican Pope. But bishops don’t vote to make themselves less important. These days there is no reason for Canterbury, or its Bishop, to be so important. How a small and rather uneventful town in Kent became the centre of a worldwide religious community is a story that develops from the earliest conversion of England, through its popularity as a pilgrimage site because of the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, to the rapid expansion of the British Empire. More from this author How the Church attacks its own And the only way to take all the acrimony from the debate is to stop Canterbury being the focus of the global Church. The Anglican Communion has long been a recipe for perpetual rancour. But all that feels a very long way away now. Planners had been “cooing in our ears about fellowship”, said the Bishop of Los Angeles. The Conference was preceded with lots of talk of reconciliation. Late on Monday night, just hours before all the purple shirts were due to gather, Justin Welby intervened to allow liberal bishops to express their disagreement with this statement. Given that a number of the bishops are themselves in same-sex marriages (their spouses were not invited), this was slightly tricky. Somehow, a text that claimed “it is the mind of the Anglican Communion as a whole that same-gender marriage is not permissible” found its way into the official papers. But however hard they tried, the question could not be managed away. The organisers of this year’s Lambeth Conference were especially keen that the world’s bishops would not get derailed by more endless arguments over gay sex. The fabric of the Communion will continue to tear, with the shrinking liberal West at continual ideological war with the burgeoning Global South, the hot button issue remaining that of homosexuality. Which is why it is likely that the next Archbishop will be even more conservative on matters of sexuality than his - and yes, it will inevitably be a him - predecessor. Yet in the years to come, the Bishops of Nigeria will play a decisive role in choosing the most senior member of the British establishment outside the royal family, and ex officio member of the House of Lords. The Church of England was formed on the basis that “the Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this realm of England”. Last month, it was agreed that it should be five - with local representation from Canterbury being halved. It used to be that the global communion supplied just one of the 17-member group that passed a name to the Queen. It may be no surprise, therefore, that the Archbishop of Canterbury has proposed that the worldwide Anglican Communion ought to have a greater say in choosing his successor. Mostly, they are in their thirties, female, black, and conservative. Never before have there been so many people in the pews. In numerical terms, Anglicanism is thriving - it is currently the third largest group of Christians in the world. By 2015, that figure had risen to 57 million and continues to grow. In 1970, there were 7.7 million Anglicans in Africa. As churchgoing collapses in the UK, and in the West more generally, in other places it is rapidly expanding. Not only that, but the worldwide Anglican Church - especially in Africa - continues to grow at an incredible rate. And they were remarkably successful at it: Cranmer proved surprisingly popular in Kigali. As the map of the world came to be covered in red, missionaries from the Church of England piggybacked upon the whole imperial project to convert indigenous peoples to the joys of the Book of Common Prayer. The Anglican Communion is the product of empire. Out in the parishes, the best we can hope for is that our parishioners won’t notice. But the only witnessing they are doing is to the brokenness and divisiveness of the Communion. The theme for this year’s conference is “God’s Church for God’s World: walking, listening and witnessing together”. They are supposed to be talking about other things as well - after all, there are 90 million Anglicans worldwide and there is much to discuss: poverty, global warming, famine, war, even secularisation. Every ten years, bishops from all over the global Anglican Communion meet up in Canterbury to argue about gay sex.